Summary: Wide-field near-infrared all-reflecting camera
with Fabry--Perot for astronomy
Yin-sheng Sun
Michael C. B. Ashley
John W. V. Storey
School of Physics, University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052, Australia
ABSTRACT
We describe the specifications and design of a 1--5 pm camera (IRC-UNSW) being built at the School of
Physics, University of New South Wales, for use on the 4-m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) and the 2.3-m
telescope of the Australian National University. The camera design uses three off-axis mirrors, allowing it to
correct the off-axis aberrations in the telescopes themselves, and to obtain images with FWHM blur circles
of 10 ,im over a wide field-of-view (4.5x4.5 arcmin on the AAT, 5.8x 5.8 on the 2.3-rn). The camera accepts
a collimated beam and can be used with an external Fabry-Perot etalon. We have fully characterised the
performance ofthe camera with respect to misalignment and manufacturing errors. A thermal model has allowed
us to calculate cool-down times, cryogen usage, and distortion due to small temperature differences in the optical
system.
Keywords: Fabry-Perot etalon, reflecting, near-infrared, imaging, astronomy
1 INTRODUCTION
Our goal is to build a camera that can acquire near-infrared images of astronomical objects at spectral resolving